Industry reps pessimistic about legislative IT reform this year

Jason Miller, Executive Editor, Federal News Radio

Reforms by Congress to how agencies buy technology are increasingly unlikely.
Industry experts are holding out little hope that multiple bills attempting to fix
long-standing problems with IT acquisition will actually get passed before the end
of the year.

Trey Hodgkins, the senior vice president for public sector at the IT Alliance for
Public Sector (ITAPS), said there are two reasons for this growing doubt.

The first is because of the congressional calendar. Lawmakers are around for two
weeks in September, and then by early to mid-October they will head back to their
districts to campaign before the mid-term elections in November. Then, there is
lame duck session in December, meaning the focus may be on a handful of the most
important bills, such as another continuing resolution or the Defense
authorization legislation.

Hodgkins said the second reason is a more typical one.

"The most significant impasse is how do these authorities apply at the Defense
Department, and determining how to make that work that is satisfactory to the
Armed Services committees as well as also satisfactory to the Oversight [and
Government Reform] and the Homeland Security [and Governmental Affairs]
committees," he said during a media briefing Wednesday in Washington. "There are
some conversations going on. They are trying to resolve it. I think the most
viable legislative path forward is as part of the Defense bill process. But it has
to reach a point of resolution because last year you had some differences of
opinion and the way the process worked out, it fell out of the final bill."

The authorities under debate specifically focus on the role of agency chief
information officers. The version of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act
(FITARA) that the House
passed is very different than the version marked up in the Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

A roadmap to reforms in the works

And, both of them are different than a simple provision in the Defense
Authorization bill that applies only to the DoD CIO, which would create an
undersecretary for management, who would be both the CIO and deputy chief
management officer.

Hodgkins said ITAPS supports a lot of what FITARA wants to do as well as the
change Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) wants to make in the Defense Department related
to its CIO.

Hodgkins said the provision changing the position of the DoD CIO is most likely to
get through Congress because it's included as part of the Defense authorization
bill, and is focused solely on DoD so the potential of lawmakers objecting to it
is small.

So that leaves whole scale IT acquisition reform from Congress as a next year
event.

"I think a lot of people are pitting their hopes on and are very optimistic about
the House Armed Services Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee process,"
Hodgkins said. "It was a similar process that matured to become the wholesale
review that occurred in the 1990s that led to Clinger-Cohen and Federal
Acquisition Streamlining Act, and a lot of other game changing acquisition reforms
of that era. So I think a lot of people are focused on that as sort of the
strategic review of getting to the root problems and trying to address it."

Hodgkins is referring to the joint effort by the House and Senate to look at DoD
acquisition reforms, and the results from that effort likely will bleed over into
the civilian world.

ITAPS is more confident in the efforts by the Office of Management and Budget
around IT reform. Hodgkins said the
TechFAR effort by the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, and some of the
workforce
initiatives to train program managers are among the efforts the association is
paying close attention to.

No shutdown this year?

So if IT reform isn't a high priority on lawmakers' agenda, the fiscal 2015 budget
is.

The House has passed seven of 12 spending bills, while the Senate has been less
active approving no appropriations bills so far.

Hodgkins said ITAPS is expecting two-and-a-half month continuing resolution to
begin 2015 and get the government through the elections.

"Military Construction would be a vehicle for a continuing resolution, and MilCon
would also be a vehicle for an omnibus, which is what the current thinking is.
They would come back from the elections and work on the omnibus," he said. "The
speculative part about this is there certainly is a plausible scenario that the
Republicans take the Senate and they decide they don't want to pass something and
block passage of a bill. They try to get passage of an additional CR into early
January, and then they come back with two Republican controlled chambers and could
pass a different omnibus and send it to the President. At this point in time, it's
still a possibility given the electoral outcomes."

Hodgkins added the likelihood of an omnibus spending bill for 2015 is strong and
if Congress can get its act together by January, it would give agencies and
contractors about nine months to plan and spend their budgets.

The one big issue ITAPS sees on the horizon is the return of sequestration in
2016. Hodgkins echoed a lot of what other experts believe that Congress has no
desire to end sequestration so vendors and agencies are preparing now for the
expected cuts that are coming in two years.

So as Congress focuses on spending bills, there are several executive branch
efforts underway to improve the IT acquisition process.

Alliant 2 to pilot cyber recommendations

One of the ones ITAPS is working on is around supply chain cybersecurity.

DoD and the General Services Administration issued recommendations in
January to improve the security of IT hardware and software
as part of President Obama's cybersecurity executive order.

Erica McCann, a manager of federal procurement at ITAPS, said GSA is looking at
the Alliant 2 governmentwide acquisition contract as a way to test out some of the
concepts outlined in the document.

"They sort of see this as a way to put their words on paper into action so
ultimately this is a good way to figure out what they are promoting is a good way
to prevent a supply chain risk or a cybersecurity risk at the first gate in the
whole process, which is the acquisition," she said. "It's a good way to test it. I
think industry is still trying to figure out how it gets tested and what it means
for the companies on the contract so that's why we continue to talk with them."

DoD also is addressing the supply chain cyber issue as part of its job under
Section 818 of the Defense authorization bill from 2013. ITAPS is watching how it
gets implemented.

Hodgkins said ITAPS would like to see agencies go through their mission areas to
decide the biggest risks in their supply chains and then ask vendors to address
those risks.

Questions rise over government competing with industry

Another area ITAPS is watching closely is the move by several agencies to bring in
IT talent to work on specific projects, such as GSA's 18F and the Department of
Health and Human Services' Buyer's Club.

McCann said the Federal Acquisition Regulations already gives contracting officers
and program managers flexibility to do agile or iterative IT development so they
are watching these offices closely.

Hodgkins said there is concern about whether 18F or the Buyer's Club will encroach
in industry opportunities.

"We've had conversations with them on what their intents are. We know, for
example, 18F intends to expand. They want to position staff in every office where
GSA has a regional office. They want to make these capabilities broadly available.
They want to incorporate the skills that can be brought to bear through the
Presidential Innovation Fellows program. So they've shared some high level
objectives they've established for themselves," he said. "But there's some things
that aren't as clear about how this works together, and how does it work in the
context of a public sector market where companies are already competing to do some
of the same things. Those are the things that aren't as clear."

Along those same lines, ITAPS also is watching the government's efforts around
strategic sourcing and how it will affect large and small businesses. Hodgkins
said included in that are GSA's continuous improvement efforts around the
schedules and GWACs.